The Last 5 Years
A journal that writes itself.
Every other journaling app hands you a blank page and asks you to fill it, every day, forever. The Last 5 Years does the opposite. It never asks you to write a single word.
Once a week, it quietly opens your own photo library, your step count, your music, and your weather, and screens the life you already lived: this same week, one, two, three, four, and five years ago.
You're No Longer the Writer. You're the Audience.
Traditional journaling apps share three quiet flaws. The blank page is discouraging, and one missed day snowballs into abandonment. They demand daily work, turning your own memories into a chore. And they hold years of your entries on someone else's servers, one shutdown or price hike away from vanishing.
The Last 5 Years solves all three at once. It starts full, because you've already spent years filling it every time you took a photo. It requires zero input. And your data never leaves your own device and iCloud.
What a week looks like
- It finds the week's best photos. Favorites, faces, portraits, and trips win. The parking-receipt screenshot loses. Rich weeks become a swipeable set, sometimes with a short silent video as the finale.
- It reads the texture of the week. Steps, workouts, weather, and even the songs you were playing add color. Your longest run of the year becomes a milestone, not a number.
- It writes the caption. Everything becomes a short, warm, cinematic line. Never a spreadsheet readout, always a small story.
- It keeps every reel. Past weeks live on a shelf, replayable exactly as they were written. Over time, the app becomes the journal you never had to keep.
- One-tap sharing. Any card becomes a postcard you can send to the friend who was in the photo.
Your data never leaves your iCloud
No account, no sign-up, no server. Photos, health data, and music are read on your device and stay there. What the app saves syncs only through your own private iCloud. No subscription and no paywall, because your memories were never anywhere but yours to begin with.
The Book Behind the App
Built by Chris Weiss, inspired by the themes of memory in The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss.
In the novel, a fading movie house holds a secret: certain reels replay the audience's own pasts, one ordinary week at a time. That's exactly what this app does. The app develops your weeks like film in a darkroom, and empty weeks aren't failures, just scenes the cinema never screened. If the app moves you, the book is where that feeling came from.
"Every memory deserves a second screening."